Error Correction. Chilean Cybernetics and Chicago’s Economists

Abstract

Cybernetics is a specific way of conceiving the relation between information and government: It represented a way of bringing the epistemological and the ontological together in real time. The essay explores a paradigmatic case study in the evolution of this history: the audacious experiment in cybernetic management known as Project Cybersyn that was developed following Salvador Allende’s ascension to power in Chile in 1970. In ideological terms, Allende’s socialism and the violent doctrine of the Chicago School could not be more opposed. In another sense, however, Chilean cybernetics would serve as the prototype for a new form of governance that would finally award to the theories of the Chicago School a hegemonic control over global society.